


twice shy

by enmity



Category: Persona Series, Persona | Revelations Persona
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Post-Canon, mild AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-16 22:26:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11838249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enmity/pseuds/enmity
Summary: still a fickle, fearful girl.





	twice shy

**Author's Note:**

> written in one sitting for kainshighwinds on tumblr some weeks ago. yet to be edited though ;;
> 
> i'm not tagging this as p2 even though the latter half is set after ep. sorry for inconsistencies etc everything i write is always mildly au to some degree anyway

At eighteen, Eriko graduates.

She attends two parties, afterwards. She spends the first surrounded by her parents and her parents’ friends, old and stiff and blanched under the mansion’s lavish lighting. Mother and Father hug and kiss her on both cheeks, talking about future and about prospects, and then they tell Eriko they’re proud of her—how she’ll always be their special little Elly, even when she’s sitting somewhere far away, under the French sky, tasting wine and exchanging loving looks with her husband who’s handsome and pre-approved and entirely as successful as they know she’ll have become by the time she’s twenty-one.  

The whole thing is a quiet affair, for the most part. Eriko stands up straight and smiles dazzlingly, accepting what is given to her, and if a few errant tears find their way falling down her cheeks and washing away her painstakingly-applied makeup, then it’s only because she’s still a teenager, at least where it truly counts. A few of the strangers see, and place sympathetic hands on her shoulders as they deliver a memorized speech about being young. Not yet a woman, not yet an adult—for once they don’t expect her to be anything more than the girl she is. It’s alright to be sad, they say, and she smiles tearfully, pretends they sound fond instead of patronizing.  

She isn’t sad; she has her whole future waiting ahead of her, glittering and promising things like accomplishments and magazine spreads and security. When put that way, the sum of her past three years doesn’t sound too bad at all. She tells herself all of this when she’s dabbing at her eyes in the bathroom stall upstairs, later, much later, through the sobs racking her chest that’s hurting because the dress is too tight around the bust, but she can’t exactly complain because her mother picked it out for her and it’s already paid for and it’s beautiful besides.

If she could make her tears look pretty she would try, but as it stands the reflection looking back at her is a hideous, lovesick thing. Eriko rests her knuckles against the marble sink and tries, tries, despite herself. She saved their city, once. She’s not supposed to be a quitter.

Eventually her eyes dry out and the lump in her throat burns a little less, so she wipes her hand on her dress, breathes in. The sound is as sharp as it is fragile and it almost surprises her. She very nearly starts crying again, but then she imagines him seeing her like this, standing at the doorway of her bathroom, face tinted with a waning yellow glow—seeing the rumpled doll of a girl she is right now—and the  _very nearly_  part of the sentence stops being true. Her mother finds her about thirty minutes later and Eriko makes up a fib about how she can’t wait to see what France looks like.

—

Ten minutes before her flight boards, Eriko’s cell phone rings. The caller ID flashes by the screen and it takes her three whole seconds to recompose herself and bring the phone to her ear. The man seated beside her is looking out the window, old and wistful. Her hand holding the phone isn’t shaking, but it could very well be.

“Hi,” says the other line, tentatively. “Elly?”

Strange, how a voice can be so disconcerting in its familiarity. It sounds crackly and filtered through the mediocre reception, and she pretends that’ll make hearing it sting a little less. “Naoya,” she says, feeling suddenly breathless.

“Maki—told me you were leaving today.” He pauses, a half-beat of silence. “I, um, wanted to wish you the best. I’m sorry I couldn’t see you off. You’re going to Europe, right? France? Have a safe trip. I’m glad the call got through; I thought I was too late.”

“It’s never too late,” she might have said, or perhaps, tell Maki I’m happy for her, truly.  

“Huh?”

She can practically imagine him blinking, dozens of kilometers away, his eyes widening ever slightly. “Thank you, Naoya,” Eriko hears herself say. “All the best to you, as well.”

They’re the proper words, but not the ones she wants to say. But when has her  _wants_  ever counted for anything? She closes her eyes and slips the phone back into her bag. Eriko’s not that kind of girl. The turbulence doesn’t make her sick with anything but brittle, bitter irony.

—

At eighteen, Hidehiko sends her an invitation. It’s in the form of a rushed text message riddled with typos and a completely unnecessary amount of smiley faces, but that’s Brown for you. She would normally be charmed by the earnestness in which he carries out his constructed façade of a personality, but he miswrote the appointment time and she ends up arriving to Peace Diner two hours early, with only a mother of two and the most menacing-looking fourteen-year-old she’s ever seen trying his damndest to undermine his bespectacled brother’s attempts to make conversation for company. Eriko sets her hands on her lap and waits for her burger to arrive.

“You beat me to it.” Naoya waves, flippant, and pulls up the chair across from hers. “Don’t tell me Brown wrote the wrong time on your text as well?”

“Two entire hours,” Eriko says, but it’s hard to muster up displeasure in her voice now that he’s here. The boy skims through the menu for a second, eyes following the letters, and when he closes it back again his gaze flits up and accidentally catches her staring, and she—just flutters a little in her seat, looks away. There are certainly more scandalous things in the world to feel warm about, but the heart of a girl has never pretended to be a reasonable thing.

Naoya looks surprisingly good in casual clothes. He says, “We’re all just leaving this city one after another, huh?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Mark. Kei. Me,” he lists, saying the last item matter-of-factly, like it’s no big deal, y’know, that he’s leaving in a week and won’t really even tell why, and as if she won’t think about it so much that it makes her miss sleep like some kind of—some kind of, “and now you, too, Eriko.” He levels his gaze at her. The restaurant suddenly feels so much quieter.

“So you heard,” she says evenly. Words start rising up her throat immediately, but she quashes them, trades impulse away for a soft smile and a hand placed innocuously on the plastic booth, a pitiful gap away from Naoya’s. She doesn’t feel it twitch once.

“France, right? I heard. Congratulations, Eriko.” He retracts his arm, links his hands together behind his head as he leans back on the chair. “It kind of almost feels like—the whole stuff with Kandori didn’t happen, don’t you think? Everything’s moving around us so fast. One moment we’re in Maki’s dream-world and the next, she’s graduating by our side. Next thing we know Reiji’ll be introducing us to his son or something.”

“Does it scare you, at least a little?”

“Yes,” he replies, too quickly and too casually for her to believe it. “Why wouldn’t it? The future is always uncertain.” His mouth curves into a smile, effortless, the same one that made her heart beat a little faster once upon a time, two years ago, a birdlike love confined in its crystal cage. Fragile enough to break away from, but she recognized the dangers of falling shards even then. “But, you know. I had you, and everyone else by my side during the worst storm. I’ll still remember that, even when I’m on my own.”

Will you remember me, too? “I’m in pursuit of a dream. If all goes well I might be able to achieve it. Will you wish me luck, Naoya?”

“You don’t need to sound so formal when you ask,” is what he says. His smile, glowing in the too-bright restaurant light, remains unchanged. Eriko draws her hand back and lets it tighten, fingers curling into themselves.

—

Naoya takes her by the hand. The contact is brief and will burn fresh in the pit of her stomach for the years to come, existing persistently even as this memory starts to fade. She doesn’t know the second part though, not yet; for now she only thinks of the warmth of his fingers sliding between hers, the clear beautiful color of his eyes looking at her, like he’s promising something other than the vague hope of a reunion, something more tangible for her to cling onto. These things are far from enough, far from ever bringing her heart any semblance of satisfaction, but Maki is standing behind her and Eriko is still a fickle, fearful girl, and so she swallows everything down, a careful repression.

She says, “The next time you see me, I’ll be a woman you can’t even recognize.”

“Then,” says the boy she loves, letting go, “it’s a promise. Okay?”

“Okay.” She watches him leave.

—

When she is twenty-two Eriko leaves her penthouse in Sumaru and takes the train bound to Mikage-cho packing a modest suitcase and a pair of sunglasses perched atop her nose. The scenery outside the window starts to grow more familiar as the hours go by, and suddenly she’s very glad of the anonymity the dark lenses provide, because she definitely feels her eyes growing warm. The trip hadn’t been a planned thing, but she now feels as if this feeling, tender and filling up the empty spaces in her heart, is what she’d been longing for when she decided to go back.

She calls Yuka first. The other woman envelops her in a tight, lingering hug, uncaring of all the people in the station nearly bumping into her when she rushed up to Eriko. “I didn’t expect I’d see you back again,” she says, smiling fondly through watery eyes. “We should catch up! Let’s go shopping or out to eat, or—anything!”

“Let’s go to Peace Diner,” Eriko says, impulsively, and though for a moment Yuka looks at her like she thinks she’s kidding, they go anyway.

—

A man is waiting for her at the hotel lobby. An ugly remaining part of her half-expects the doppelganger to greet her instead of Naoya, but she blinks, and her suspicion is washed away as she walks up to him, easily, the feeling wiped like chalk on a board. Naoya looks largely unchanged after four years; his hair is still unruly and his one earring is still intact, and his smile still doesn’t fail to make her pause.

“I’ll tell you all about France,” she tells him, as they make their way outside the glass doors. “And, well, about some other things, too. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.” And this time, she allows herself to hold his hand first. The doors swing shut behind them and she walks to the car with a skip to her step, with joy, but most importantly alongside him; and for once, it feels like enough.


End file.
